Wildenthal is a historian of modern Germany, European women and gender, modern colonialism, and human rights. A Rice alumna (Hanszen 1987), she received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1994 and was a faculty member at Pitzer College, M.I.T., and Texas A&M University before coming to Rice in 2003. She is the author of The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Duke University Press, 2001), and has edited or co-edited two further books.

When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In confrontation and sometimes cooperation with men, these women launched nationalist and colonialist campaigns for increased settlement and new state policies. Wildenthal analyzes Colonial Office archives as well as mission society records, periodicals, womenâ€™s memoirs, and fiction to show how these women created niches for themselves in the colonies. While pressing for career opportunities, these women also campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated images of African and Pacific women as sexually promiscuous and inferior. The German colonial imaginary persisted even after the German colonial empire was no longer a reality, and these womenâ€™s colonial movement continued into the Nazi era.